Diego Mollá Aliod

AnswerFinder

Have you ever been frustrated by the poor search results returned
by your favourite search engine? Have you ever wished that your search
engine returned not documents, but the exact piece of text that matches
your query? Have you ever dreamt of a Web tool that consults the Web
to find the specific answer to your question? If you have answered
"yes" to any of these questions, then you know why we want to develop
AnswerFinder.

AnswerFinder is a new project that is being developed by the Centre
for Language Technology at Macquarie University. The goal is to
produce a system that is able to find the answer to arbitrary user
questions by consulting the information available in text
documents.

The main problem that AnswerFinder faces is the representation and
fast processing of the semantic contents of the text
documents. AnswerFinder uses a variation of the Flat Logical Forms
(FLFs) used in ExtrAns, an answer extraction system developed at the
University of Zurich.

To improve efficiency, AnswerFinder will combine ExtrAns' technology
with methodologies developed for running question-answering systems
such as those competing in the QA track of the TREC conference.

[2007/05/04] AFNER 0.1, the named entity
recogniser of AnswerFinder, has been released. If you would like the program send
an email to Diego. Include in your
email a one-paragraph description of your background and a
one-paragraph of what you would like to do with Afner.

As a PhD student: If you have an interesting topic of research that has to do with question answering, send us an email and we will get in touch with you.

As a Masters/Honours student: If you are a Masters or an Honours student in Macquarie University and you are searching for a project, consult the list of Honours projects. Many of these projects can be adapted to Masters projects.

As an undergraduate student: If you are a student enrolled in Macquarie Ubiversity you can also work for AnswerFinder and get paid for it. Consult the list of summer projects.